Description

Mysterium Cosmographicum – a comedy in three partslive video performance, approximately 90 minutes2011

It has been said that the manufacturing industry in the United States has declined precipitously. Automobile factories, steel mills, textile plants have closed, their activities shipped offshore to more pollute-able climes, environments conducive to cheaper labor. Mysterium Cosmographicum, a 3-part video essay and performance incorporating materials culled from music videos, documentaries, movies, YouTube and other sources from the cultural zeitgeist, argues against this assertion, suggesting that manufacturing is indeed alive and well in the United States, the world's leading exporter of emotional catharsis.

In this defining work of the Hoser Formalist genre, materials appropriated from the culture industry are flushed through a range of custom-designed software tools, digested and manipulated by video game controllers and rendered into a burbling digital stew exploring the nature of knowledge, belief, delusion, and emotion. "I can't live if living is without you," he said, as his tear-stained cheek glistened in the glare of the klieg lights. Slowly, his finger tightened around the trigger . . . .

"As an internet trolling, black-metal-loving, post-suburbanite, Brent Coughenour scrapes out the media entrails of a godless digital culture, looking for signs of what might have been named sacred, but that today appears as hacker code or masculine brio templates . . . . Call it a science fiction dystopia of the present. A ghost of a protest still shaking its rattle deep inside the machine, offering the disused or under-looked traditions of the avant-garde as a way out of the endless feedback loop that appears as a parody of infinity. Transcendence may be a thing of the past, but not dissent. Turn on, tune in, and keep cutting. There are many ways left to say no." – Mike Hoolboom